Thanks, trimming and joining worked on the dome and is a nice addition to my bag of tricks. :)

I tried the same thing to join the engine platform to the saucer, but it took a long time to calculate and the end product was a joined surface, not a solid.

[Edit]

I seem to have succeeded by first moving the engine platform down ever so slightly, then the boolean union to the saucer worked. Then I trimmed and joined the dome on. Hopefully this works for the final! :)

Hi LOTRJ - I think that the second Trim + Join is going to work, just that there are a few non-obvious pieces poking through in a few areas that you also need to pick to keep, or else you'll get holes there.

To find these pieces, before trimming select the 2 solids and run Construct / Curve / Isect.

This will calculate the intersection curves between the 2 parts, and they will be added to the model as just regular curve objects and they will be selected so you can see them.

After those are created, try to zoom around and inspect the intersections (zoom in a starting point and then rotate around and follow it), you'll see a few places where pieces of the solids are poking through - the one piece is not totally "submerged" in the other:

There is one little piece here:








There is a companion to that on the mirror side, and then there is also this one in the front in the bottom:




Also you may want to just hide the solids after you make the intersection curves so that all you see on the screen are the intersection curves by themselves, that makes it a little easier to see little separate bits floating around.

So those are 3 little areas that have tiny fragments that you need to select if using Trim mode = Keep or else they are going to get discarded and have holes there.

I think if those get selected then you'll be set, I'll give that a try in a minute here myself.

One other note - when you do get a joined srf instead of a solid, it can be handy to have this script set up on a keyboard shortcut:

script:var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; gd.deselectAll(); var breps = gd.getObjects().getBreps(); for ( var i = 0; i < breps.length; ++i ) breps.item(i).getNakedEdges().setProperty( 'selected', true );

That will highlight the "naked edges" (edges that are not joined) so you can see where the holes are exactly, that can help to you figure out what is going on. Try to hit Reset after that so you can zoom in on the selected edges, or if there are a bunch of them in different areas you may want to do a Copy and then hide everything and then do Paste to get just those curves showing on the screen to see where they are.

- Michael

Hi LOTRJ - just saw your edit - yeah probably when you moved it around a bit it got things "fully submerged" and got rid of those little tiny poking out areas that I had those 3 screenshots of in the previous post.

I would bet though that Trim + Join would work without moving if you selected those pieces in those 3 areas that were poking through.

- Michael

By the way, this is going to be an awesome addition to the fleet - I hope you'll post the physical part when you're done, it is really cool to see those.

- Michael

Hi LOTRJ, I just verified that Trim+Join does work to get a solid with stuff in your original location, if you zoom in and pick those 3 additional little pieces that were poking through to keep as well.

So just in case you don't want to move anything around later or something, that method is available.

I'll take a look and see if anything sticks out very easily about why the booleans did not work well in these cases, but it tends to be awfully difficult to figure things out in debugging when there are a lot of pieces, sort of like looking for a needle in a haystack...

- Michael

Thanks so much, it's just really nice to have this level of user support from a software developer. :)

Hopefully you can figure out the problem. I'll be sure to post any pics of the Zenithian class 3's when I get some!

If it helps with the de-bugging any, the main tools that I used for the dome were network, offset, trim, and shell.

>>>>>It looks like you got a result with all edges joined to another edge, so it will be labeled as a solid, but it seems to have some internal pieces that did not get trimmed away...
>>>>>>

Ahhhh, much better result. Thanks for the new method. Didnt think of "trim" first.